It was always drilled into me that the
Zarathushti religion has had a significant impact on many other religions.
Amongst others, I recall a Mr. Keki Chinoy who would sit, with snuff box
at hand and handlebar moustache well waxed, on the verandah of the local
gymkhana and make proclamations: one of which was that “even if the
Zarathushti faith itself died out, it would still live on through many
others.” (Most of his other proclamations, usually made over a club
sandwich and glass of shandy, were of the more colorful but less accurate
variety. But let that not detract from his one valid observation.)

Time was when I sought to understand the
religion’s historic significance more than its spiritual essence.
Uncomfortably locked out of the collective religious consciousness for the
first time when I came to the US, I needed reinforcement. I needed to be
told, and I needed the tools with which to tell others that my religion
was epic, pioneering and monumental. For a while I cruised public
libraries solo with my notebook in hand. Copious notes of obscure facts
gave me ammunition that I hurled at startled Christians, Jews, Moslems,
Buddhists, Bahais, Rastafarians, Taoists, and Scientologists to show them
the stuff my religion was really made of. So it was with a sense of deja
vu and some smugness that I picked up Jon Berquist’s book, Judaism in
Persia’s Shadow [Fortress Press]. Though some never admit it, and some no
doubt never feel it, in many Parsi hearts lurks a silent competitiveness
with the Jewish faith. Under contest is the prize for which one is really
the world’s oldest revealed religion; and, it is a contest we Parsis
usually lose. But being No. 2, we try harder, and so I read keenly how the
two faiths had acted upon, and with, each other.

Berquist’s book is written to answer a simple
question “ how did the absorption of Judah (which the Persians called
Yehud) into the Persian Empire affected its ideology, self-understanding
and religion? The book is an investigation into the way the Achaemenian
Empire of Cyrus the Great influenced and changed Judaism, It focuses on
the secular influences administrative, legal, military and social
structures brought by Cyrus and his successors. Post-Persian Judah.
Painting a vivid picture of the years from 539 BCE, when Judah first came
under the rule of Cyrus the Great, to around 333 BCE when the Persian
Empire fell to Alexander, Berquist takes us on a journey that unravels
life just before and under the Achaemenians.

The book begins with a simple premise that
society shapes people, and people create literature. As society changes,
so does literature. The drive for his book, says Berquist, came from the
radical change Judaic texts underwent between 539 BCE and 333 BCE when
Judah was part of the Persian Empire. The most important difference is the
element of universalism in the post-Persian texts, Berquist explained.
Earlier Judaism was quite particularistic in many ways but the later
writing is more embracing of differences. More significantly, says
Berquist, post-Persian Judaic writings reject idolatry and embrace a
monotheistic, priestly form of Yahwism for the first time. In his precise
but uninspiring chronicling of Judah, Berquist tells of how the
Babylonians enslaved the Jews in 625 BCE and how Cyrus the Great freed
them and returned them to their lands in 539 BCE. Under the Babylonians,
Berquist writes, “the removal (through death or deportation) of the upper
strata of Jerusalemite and Judaic society devastated Jewish life. In 539
BCE, the return of the Jews to Judah and the re-building of their temples
that Cyrus funded and oversaw resulted in a regeneration of the Jewish
faith.” “I found a richness in Persian Yehud that bedazzled me.” Berquist
writes. “he Persian Empire produced a pluralistic context in which
Jerusalem survived, grew and flourished, and the faith of Yahweh was never
the same, in any of its expressions.”

Most significantly, we are told, Cyrus and
subsequent Persian Emperors allowed the many faiths under their control to
flourish and they themselves praised the beneficence of gods as diverse as
Yahweh, Marduk and others. Of course, as predictable in a book about
Persians and Jews, the protagonists from these two races generally come
off looking like valiant, gallant and wise servants of God trying to build
a noble society in His real, intended way, while the Babylonians and
Assyrians are mostly feckless, brutal wannabes whose vision of life is
woefully misguided. Even as Berquist chronicles Cyrus’ munificence
succinctly, his explanation for why Cyrus acted as he did is incomplete.
In a section entitled Cyrus Interests, he offers up ease of
administration, economic astuteness, the difficulty in maintaining a large
empire, and a desire to focus on conquest, as the primary reasons for
Cyrus’ managerial philosophy. Of the later king, Darius, he writes that
“he was a monotheist, possibly along the lines of Zoroaster, but that for
political reasons he maintained a pluralistic polytheistic empire.”
Berquist fails to conceive, however, that Cyrus and Darius progressive
ideas might have stemmed from their own religious beliefs, which might
have shaped their actions as much, if not more, than practical
considerations. Though he himself, in later passages, talks of how the
Persians introduced the element of universality into Jewish writing, he
fails to see Cyrus’ and Darius’ actions as a manifestation of the
universal ideal inherent in the religion of Zarathushtra.

Liberty to grow. Berquist also forms the
interesting thesis that under secular Achaemenian rule Judaism was free to
flourish without political constraints for the first time in its history.
According to him, the Persian Empire created controlled environments in
which independent yet related cultures could grow. By researching and
investigating the administrative, military and social aspects of how
Persia governed its new colony, Yehud, he explains how it left an enduring
impact on the two key religions, Judaism and Christianity, that grew from
there. The separation of church and state allowed religious thoughts to
thrive without imperial interference and under the Achaemenians Judaic
writing became highly diverse and pluralistic. The canon of the Torah as
well as other canonical scriptures developed, setting the stage for
formative Judaism. Set off by a more pluralistic and universalist
thinking, diverse views of Yahwehism flourished. Monotheism and the
rejection of idol worship crept into Judaic consciousness. The role of the
temple and the priesthood changed significantly and along Persian
(Zoroastrian?) lines.

Both formative Judaism and nascent
Christianity developed within the context of a society and a religion that
had been shaped by the Persian Empire, is his conclusion towards the end
of the book.

[i]
This book review originally appeared in the FEZANA journal of Winter
2004, and was posted on vohuman.org on June 28, 2005 courtesy of the
reviewer, Mr. Jehangir Pocha and the editor of FEZANA journal Mrs.
Roshan Rivetna. The book was published by Fortress Press in 1995,
ISBN 0800628454.

[ii]As of the
decade of 1990s Jon L. Berquist was an academic editor at Chalice
Press and the author of numerous books, including Judaism in
Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach and Incarnation.